


Changeling

by elaine



Category: The Sentinel
Genre: Alternate Universe - Elf, M/M, why should Blair always be the pregnant elf?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-23
Updated: 2013-11-23
Packaged: 2018-01-02 09:47:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1055332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elaine/pseuds/elaine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ever had that sinking feeling the morning after? Blair has.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Changeling

**Author's Note:**

> This story was written after a discussion with Chriselora and Snycock about why it's always Blair who's the pregnant elf in fanfic. In other words, i'm not taking all the blame for this one...

  
It had happened before, Blair thought, rather frantically. He'd gone to bed with someone he thought he'd known and woken up with an entirely different person. But this was different. This was  _Jim_ , the most important person in his life. And besides… this was more than just the usual awkward morning after.  
  
Jim was  _different_.   
  
 _Really_  different.  
  
He was still recognisably Jim, of course, but that only made it worse. Because Jim wasn't supposed to have long, sleek blond hair, or – and this was the thing that made Blair want both to scream and to laugh hysterically at the same time – pointed ears. Elf ears.  
  
Jim… was an elf.  
  
Blair bit down on his knuckle and stifled a nervous giggle.  
  
Jim stared at him reproachfully.  
  
 _Reproachfully_. Jim just didn't do reproachful. Annoyance, irritation, even anger, yes, but not reproachful.  
  
This just wasn't possible. But, until he woke from this nightmare, he might as well play along, Blair thought. He'd wake soon.  
  
 _Please god_ , he'd wake soon…  
  
Very soon.  
  
Jim stared at him expectantly, one hand absently stroking the smooth strands of hair flowing over his shoulder. “Don't you like me anymore, Blair?” His eyes – still very much Jim's crystal blue eyes – filled with tears and his lower lip trembled pathetically. One fat, perfect tear spilled over and rolled slowly down his cheek. “I thought you liked me.”  
  
“I did!” Blair hastily amended his verb tense, “I  _do_! I  _really_  do, Jim. But you've gotta admit, this is kinda… unexpected.” A thought occurred to him. “Did you know this was going to happen?”  
  
Uh oh… that was obviously the wrong question. Jim's face crumpled (and how he did that and still managed to look absolutely beautiful, Blair would really like to know) and he hiccuped back a sob.  
  
“I'm sorry! I'm sorry, I just don't know what to do here, Jim.”  
  
Jim's expression magically cleared. It actually did look a lot like the sun coming out from behind a cloud. Blair was impressed.   
  
He was even more impressed when Jim casually tossed aside the covers. “You could always come back to bed.”  
  
Blair was only human (or maybe that should be… Human?). He went back to bed.  
  
*  
  
 **several hours later…  
  
** “Jim,  _goddammit_ , let me in!” Blair pounded on the bathroom door. Polite requests had failed. Pleading had failed. His next option would be an axe, he supposed. “You've been in there over an hour and I really need to take a piss.”  
  
“Why didn't you say so, Blair?” The door opened and Jim's face, wreathed in smiles, appeared in the gap. Blair pushed past him, making a beeline for the toilet. He hadn't been kidding about that.  
  
With a put upon sigh, Jim went over to the washbasin, where the only mirror was situated and began preening again. Blair ignored him; he had more important things to do right now.  
  
When he'd finished, Blair went over to the washbasin and stood behind Jim. The hint was wasted. Jim was leaning close to the mirror, a tiny, perfect frown drawing his brows together. “Is that a pimple?” The alarm was, apparently, genuine.  
  
“Huh?” Blair glanced up from his contemplation of Jim's perfect ass. “Oh, that? It's a mole. You've had it forever. I'd like to wash my hands now, please.”  
  
“But I'm…” Jim lowered the tweezers from his already immaculate eyebrows. He sighed. “You won't be long?”  
  
Blair rolled his eyes. “I promise.”  
  
“All right.” Jim moved aside, watching Blair with barely concealed impatience.   
  
When Blair finished washing his hands, Jim tried to move back. Blair stood his ground. “Jim,” he said firmly, “we need to talk.”  
  
Alarm flittered decoratively across Jim's face. “What about?”  
  
The last hour had given Blair a degree of immunity to Jim's facial gymnastics. “What do you  _think_  I want to talk about, Jim?”  
  
“But I thought…” he gestured down at his naked body, “I thought you liked…”  
  
“I  _do_ , Jim.” And boy was he getting tired of reassuring him. This new Jim was every bit as insecure as the original one, but he was a helluva lot less adept at hiding it. Or just wasn't trying… “But I still want to know some things. How about you put this on…” he tossed Jim a bathrobe, “and we'll go sit on the couch and talk.”  
  
“The couch.” Jim smiled hopefully. “I like the couch…”  
  
*  
  
It wasn't easy to keep Jim on track, but eventually Blair got as much of the story as he thought he was going to, at least for the present. It seemed that his taciturn cop boyfriend had always been an elf. He just hadn't known about it until the spell had been broken.  
  
“What kind of spell?” Blair asked, his heart sinking.  
  
Jim stopped fiddling with his hair for a moment, regarding the pale golden strands thoughtfully. “Do you think it would look better braided? Oh, the spell… well it was placed on me by my parents when I was just an elfling.”  
  
Elfling. The word made Blair's blood run cold. He'd already asked for Jim's real name and been told, rather condescendingly he thought, that he'd never be able to pronounce it and he might as well stick with 'Jim'.  
  
“You see, I was promised at birth to Another.” Jim smiled cheerily, totally oblivious to Blair's reaction. “But he turned out rather badly. At least that's what my parents… you can call them Elrond and Galadriel – told me before they cast the spell.”  
  
Blair wasn't sure which was most shocking, that Jim had been placed under a spell by his parents, or that he was, apparently, a fan of Lord of the Rings. “What was the spell, Jim?”  
  
He had to wait a while for an answer, as Jim had found some kind of irregularity in one of his fingernails and needed to rectify it urgently. “Oh, well, they put a Spell of Misdirection on me, and made me forget that I had ever been an elf.”  
  
“So… why did… um, when we…” Blair made a vague gesture, unable to bring himself to be more explicit.  
  
“Oh, Blair…” Jim smiled sweetly at him, and lunged forward, draping himself over Blair with his arms around Blair's neck. “The spell could only be broken by my One True Love, of course.” He nuzzled Blair's throat hopefully.  
  
“That's nice.” Blair patted his shoulder absently, his mind working furiously. “But don't you have to marry this… what'sisname now?”  
  
Jim's laughter really did sound like little silver bells chiming musically. “Humans are so  _silly_. Of course not! No one can part True Lovers. Not even… you can call him Sauron.”  
  
“So, as long as we're lovers, you're safe?” There was a hollow feeling at the pit of his stomach.  
  
“Isn't it  _wonderful_?” Jim started fiddling with the buttons on his shirt and Blair agreed, with a little more enthusiasm, that indeed it was.  
  
*  
  
 **seven long, frustrating days later…**  
  
Blair was pretty certain that if he put the words 'high maintenance' into an image search on the internet, he'd get a picture of Jim with long blond hair and pointy ears. Of course, Jim always _had_  been high maintenance, but Blair had never minded before. He minded now.  
  
To be fair it had been a particularly difficult week. He'd called Simon and told him Jim was having problems with his senses. It bought them some time, at least, although what good it would do he wasn't really sure. Mostly, Blair admitted to himself if not to Jim, he'd been hoping that the situation would resolve itself as dramatically and inexplicably as it had arisen in the first place.  
  
Not surprisingly, that hadn't happened. All he'd achieved was to make Jim bored and restless and even more irritating than usual. Jim wanted to go to work…   
  
“It's not that simple, Jim.” Maybe tearing his hair out by the fistful would help, Blair thought desperately. “How are we supposed to explain…” he waved his hand in the general direction of Jim's softly gleaming locks and pointy ears. “Besides…” he thought better of what he'd intended to say and closed his mouth firmly. Somehow he didn't think Simon would appreciate his best detective turning up in a pair of grey leather pants and a cream linen tunic with Elvish lettering embroidered on the sleeves and around the neck. He probably wouldn't approve of the long green cloak and the bow and quiver full of arrows either. Jim was “rediscovering his roots”, as he insisted on describing it.  
  
Plus, Blair was pretty sure that Jim's ability to solve even the simplest crime had vanished along with his receding hairline. Not that he would ever dare say that to Jim. But they were in serious trouble. Without Jim's income, they'd soon be in financial difficulties – Blair's grants barely supported  _him_ , they couldn't cover Jim's expenses as well. And it was no use trying to discuss it with Jim; his solution to every problem was to try to drag Blair back to bed. Mostly, he succeeded without much effort although Blair was starting to get a little pissed off that Jim always insisted on bottoming.  
  
Unfortunately, he hesitated too long, trying to find some way to convey the urgency of the situation and Jim got bored. Which, inevitably, led to him dragging Blair upstairs and pushing him down onto the bed.  
  
Resistance was… well, a waste of time. Blair set about making Jim happy, not exactly unwillingly but with a feeling of resignation he'd never associated with sex until a few days ago. Luckily, it wasn't difficult to make Jim happy; as long as he was on his back with Blair on top of him, it was pretty much guaranteed that before long he'd be yelling Blair's name in joyous abandon.  
  
“Blair! Oh, yes… yes, Blair, please…” Jim writhed beneath him, his long blond hair clinging damply to his sweaty skin, his face contorted with passion.   
  
It was the only time Blair ever saw him in a state of less than perfect grooming, and it was an awe-inspiring sight. He thrust harder, driving Jim's cries to a crescendo until finally Jim came in hot, wet spurts against his belly. A couple more thrusts and he'd reach his own climax… Blair took a deep breath and-  
  
“Oh Blair, we'll make beautiful babies…” Jim smiled beatifically up at him.  
  
Blair hesitated, mid-thrust. “Wait… what…?” Every muscle in his body froze. “ _Babies_?” the last word came out embarrassingly like a squeak. At least this explained why Jim always made a beeline for the baby section of JC Penney's whenever they went to the mall… he'd been puzzled by that.   
  
“Yes. Isn't it wonderful?” Oblivious, at first, to Blair's reaction, Jim suddenly frowned. “Uh, Blair…”  
  
Blair sat back on his heels, staring down at his shrivelled penis in dismay. “ _What_ , Jim?”  
  
Maybe he spoke too sharply. Jim's bottom lip trembled. “Don't you want babies?”  
  
“Want babies? Jim, how the hell is that even  _possible_?” And that didn't help either, but Blair wasn't in the mood to deal with Jim's tantrums. Then a horrible thought occurred to him. “You're not already…”  
  
Jim shook his head slowly from side to side, pouting. “Not yet.”  
  
 _Oh, thank god_ … Blair managed a tremulous smile. “So you can get pregnant? How do you give bir… no, on second thoughts, don't tell me.”  
  
Tears filled Jim's eyes. They were getting dangerously close to a display of histrionics that would put any two-year-old to shame. “But don't you want…?”  
  
“ _No_! I mean…” Blair had never thought so fast in his life, “I mean… shouldn't I meet your parents first?”  
  
***  
  
It had been an act of desperation. For all Blair knew – and with the way his luck was running – Jim's parents would be just as big a pair of fruitcakes as their son. They weren't. They were, quite frankly, terrifying.  
  
“So, let me clarify,” 'Elrond' leaned forward, his dark eyes fixed searchingly on Blair's face. “You don't want to be our son's True Love?”  
  
“The spell can't be wrong.” 'Galadriel' said calmly. “You must be mistaken.”  
  
“I'm not mistaken.” Blair glanced nervously at the door. Jim was on the other side, and Blair could only hope he wasn't using his sentinel abilities right now. “It's just that I fell in love with a grumpy, balding cop and then he turned into… into…”  
  
“Our son.” 'Elrond' sighed.  
  
Blair sighed too. “Yeah.”  
  
'Galadriel' exchanged a long look with 'Elrond'. “But the spell…”  
  
“Look,” Blair interrupted, nervously. Jim's parents were  _seriously_  intimidating. “I don't want to break up with Jim, I just want the old Jim back. Can't you do something?”  
  
There was a long silence, which Blair managed, with great difficulty, not to break. He might even have held his breath. Finally 'Galadriel' turned her head to look critically at Blair. He managed to keep still and not blurt out anything inappropriate. It wasn't easy.  
  
She smiled, rather glacially. “We may be able to do something.”  
  
***.  
  
It was taking a long time. Blair paced. He fidgeted. He muttered under his breath and jittered. Why was it taking so long?  
  
He couldn't hear anything from the other room where 'Elrond' and 'Galadriel' had taken Jim, and that only made him more anxious. When the massive wooden doors creaked open, Blair almost jumped out of his skin.  
  
Jim looked like… like Jim. The old Jim. The-almost-middle-aged-cranky-cop-with-the-receding-hairline-Jim. He stared at Blair, a tiny frown between his brows.  
  
Blair smiled tentatively, his stomach fluttering with nerves. “Uh… Jim? You okay? What happened in there?”  
  
The frown deepened. “I don't want to talk about it, Chief.”  
  
 _Yes! He's back!_  Blair's smile widened into a grin. “Let's go home.”  
  



End file.
